The Koch Brothers’ Father May Have Built an Oil Refinery for the Nazis

Left, by Justin Lane/EPA/Corbis; Right, from The Washington Post/Getty Images.

Adolf Hitler’s name is invoked so often in disagreements online that the Internet has popularized its own rule, Godwin’s Law, to describe the increasing probability that any discussion will ultimately reference Nazism. The inevitable Hitler comparisons come twice as quickly, it seems, when politics are involved. It seems only fitting, then, that the billionaire brothers Charles G. and David H. Koch, the deep-pocketed conservative donors who are routinely lambasted on the left as controlling the Republican Party’s corporatist agenda, would be linked to the Third Reich.

According to The Washington Post’s preview of Dark Money, a forthcoming book by New Yorker writer Jane Mayer, the Koch family has a long history of business dealings with totalitarian regimes. “It has long been known that Fred Koch made part of his early fortune working in Stalin’s Russia,” the Post writes. But the original Koch-family patriarch also worked to secure a construction deal in Nazi Germany—an allegation that had never before been reported—where he eventually received permission from Adolf Hitler:

In 1934, Mayer reports, Fred Koch’s firm provided engineering plans and began overseeing construction of a massive oil refinery near Hamburg, which would become a component of the Nazi war machine, supplying fuel for German warplanes. When the United States entered World War II in 1941, Koch tried to enlist in the U.S. military, which would, in 1944, destroy the Hamburg refinery.

That oil refinery, a joint venture with American Nazi sympathizer William Rhodes Davis, was at that time the third-largest plant of its kind in Nazi Germany, The New York Times reports.

Fred Koch was also a great admirer of German discipline, the Post notes, and in the 1930s “hired a fervent Nazi as a governess for his eldest boys,” Frederick and Charles. “Dark Money suggests that the experience of being toilet trained by a Nazi may have contributed to Charles Koch’s antipathy toward government today.”

Ken Spain, a spokesman for Koch Industries, now one of the largest privately held corporations in the United States, told the Times and the Post that company officials “declined to participate in the book and have not read it.

“If the content of the book is reflective of Ms. Mayer’s previous reporting of the Koch family, Koch Industries, or Charles’ and David’s political involvement, then we expect to have deep disagreements and strong objections to her interpretation of the facts and their sourcing,” he added in the statement.